How simple would it be to just uncheck a certain option in IE and fix this brain busting issue, especially for Network Admins and SP Admins?

Solution

Open Internet Explorer

Go to the Menu “Tools” > “Internet Options” then go to the “Connections” tab

Click on button “LAN Settings”

Uncheck the box “Automatically detect settings” (culprit)

Close and restart all running Internet Explorer processes

Restart the “Web Client” Service, if needed.

Start browsing again…!

Now for a bit of knowledge building

What is the “Automatically Detect Settings” option in IE?

The “Automatically detect settings” option is there to help the user in configuring a web proxy automatically. It actually makes use of the WPAD protocol to discover a web proxy.

1. If the PC is configured to do DHCP, then it will query the server. If the response includes a string with id 252, then it uses this to retrieve a configuration file.

2. If this fails, then the PC will attempt to resolve the name wpad. It will start in its current domain, and work back through. Eg, if the PC is called bob.cs.anu.edu.au, it will attempt to resolve wpad.cs.anu.edu.au, followed by wpad.anu.edu.au, etc. If this resolves the name wpad, then IE will attempt to retrieve wpad.dat via http from the root of the server. You should probably redirect this to the configuration file.

You should now be able to export your site template and save it to a local drive on your MOSS box.

Issue 2:Now it’s time to use the newly exported site template just incase you need to create a root site collection (you will need to add it to the available Site Collection templates). Simply use the STSADM command below:

Microsoft have recently released (Apr 28, 2009) Service Pack 2 for Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, available for download through the Microsoft Download Center.

Highlights of SP2

It is an all inclusive (SP1 + new SP2) that contains several enhancements targetted to improve server-farm performance, availability and stability.

A new stsadm operation has been added to help customers prepare for the upgrade to the next version of SharePoint.

Reliability improvements in Indexing and Index Corpus

Security Improvements

New STSADM Commands including some to fix corruption and relationships (orphaning)

It is highly recommend to install the new service pack for its variety of benefits, including improved performance and availability, improved interoperability, broader support for browsers (apart from MS) and preparation for the next version of SharePoint.

The toolkit contains functionality to diagnose performance issues, perform bulk operations on site collections, an Stsadm operation to update alert e-mails after the URL for a Web application has been changed, and a User Profile Replication Engine tool.

For MOSS’ers since 1820 here are the new features:The SharePoint Diagnostics tool provides administrators with a unified interface for troubleshooting SharePoint Server performance issues. Use the tool to collect data from performance counters, ULS log files, IIS log files, event logs, and WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), and then display and analyze the data in snapshots and custom reports.

The setup program is updated to work gracefully with User Access Controlps: You no longer need to manually run as administrator

All MOSS’ers! Did you recently face this issue following an installation/update of MOSS 2007 with SP1: “The IIS manager or well known as the inetmgr mmc does not show up or is blank”. This issue might have occured if you have recently patched up the MOSS WF, APP with updates or can occur abrubtly. You may also notice that it takes a fairly longer time for the IIS administration to show up – but it’s blank! Investigation:Upon investigation, you may see a repeated error in the Application log event viewer on the SharePoint WF servers. These errors usually include one of the following three events:- Event ID 6398- Event ID 6482- Event ID 7076

Resolution:From the word go, you can start rectifying the issue by stopping and restarting the OWSTimer ["Windows SharePoint Timer Service"] that runs on any of your servers in the farm or on your single server installation. You do not necessarily need to restart your server or any other service if you need to do this. I will post more on this issue if needed. However, Microsoft now has a hotfix to rectify this problem! You can click here to download it…Though you wouldn’t be much impressed with it!